Help your customers embrace cloud services to serve business stakeholders
In Parts 1 and 2, we outlined the steps involved for you to help customers reduce their shadow IT and position yourself as a c...

The contemporary business environment is essentially a small subsystem in the larger cyber world. Every enterprise, no matter how technically progressive or apprehensive about technology, is connected...

A friend of mine asked me if he should buy cyber insurance for his business. Whether your need is for a self-hosted/owned, cloud or hybrid infrastructure this is not an easy answer. As I thought about...

Sungard Availability Services is honored to be the newest sponsor of the Cloud Services Community.
As part of our sponsorship we’ll be sharing information, best practices and selling techniques that help you recommend and sell production and recovery cloud services plus managing applications in the cloud, such as SAP and Oracle.
We are also looking to collaborate with the community on ways to help you enhance your services portfolio. What can Sungard AS do more of or differently to help you enhance your own cloud practice? What new products, services or other offerings can you provide that increase profitability and position...

Craig’s View: Service Provider as a Channel (SPaaC)
As the cloud becomes more pervasive in today’s IT environment, new business models are forming – which of course bring on new acronyms! My latest, “SPaaC”, describes how Service Providers are becoming more ‘front and center’ in the Solution Provider community. In fact, several of the largest Solutions Provider Partners in the channel like Presidio, Dimension Data and Logicalis are creating special practices to embrace the Service Provider model. This is indicative of the changing landscape from product to service orientation and will create a morphing of balance sheet models and roles and...

As I spend more and more time with channel partners, it is becoming evident that they are leveraging their relationships with end customers to deliver more and more value. In some cases, people leading channels for technology vendors are helping to enable this and investing in programs to educate and nurture their channels—but not all. When the partner is in charge at the point of the customer, what does it mean to the vendor behind them?
Let’s take the oft-hyped move to the cloud that many channel partners currently are navigating. (There is so much hype around this, our company decided...

Written by Penny Gralewski
Want to hear 6 secrets to hosted services profitability and scalability? How are service providers automating tasks and speeding delivery of hosted services with one specific technology? Why are subscribers of some hosted service providers finding a fast self-service method to add new users or services to a hosted desktop environment?
Here’s the secret: Citrix CloudPortal Services Manager.
Service providers can find a profitable and successful secret in CloudPortal Services Manager:
Lower technical overhead costs
Delegate new tasks across members of busy service provider technical teams
Fewer support desks calls
Easier subscriber on-demand requests for hosted apps,...

By Scott Lindars
Earlier this year, Citrix launched the Citrix Service Provider Center of Excellence, designed to assist Citrix Service Provider partners in every stage of the business development lifecycle, from onboarding and planning, through technical implementation and marketing, all the way to launching and growing. The Center of Excellence provides an end-to-end business and technology framework that includes strategy, operations, marketing, sales and technology planning guides and tools. You can learn more about the Center of Excellence by watching this video and reading the Solution Brief.
Since its inception, we’ve seen a huge uptake on Citrix partners coming to the Center of Excellence as they plan, implement...